Trampoline
Today my boss told me I was pale and suggested I needed a day off and a massage. Probably not a good sign. But then again, maybe she'll fork out for the spa day?Friends, the next time you open up your work email account and hit 'compose message', let me caution you to think again. For I, while Googling (as one does on a quiet Thursday evening), came across a very interesting (and disturbing) website. As many of you know, I spent 3 of my formative career years working for a company we'll call the 'Big E'. It is no surprise to anyone the spectacular implosion this company went through...but did you know that a good portion of our emails are up on the internet for all of the public to see??? Thankfully, it is only a mere 200,000 of what must be millions and millions of correspondence from a short period of time. I was too small a peon when I was there to have written anything important, but there are a few up there between me and one of my friends, who happened to become quite a high level exec there. Here is an excerpt from the homepage of this site:
In October 2003 the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission placed 200,000 of Company E's internal emails from 1999-2002 into the public domain as part of its ongoing investigations. The archive offers an extraordinary window into the lives and preoccupations of E's top executives during a turbulent period....Engineers used this data as testbed during development of the company's SONAR technology. The result was so fascinating we decided to open it up and allow anyone to dig in. The Company E Explorer lets you investigate the actions and reactions of E's senior management team as the noose began to tighten.
Thankfully I left the Big E midway through 2000 to go to graduate school, but reading through this website is like turning the clock back...big time. I found emails between one of my friends and his mother...another one mentioning another friend being terminated and re-hired...one inviting me to a happy hour for margaritas...and another one from the infamous CEO from Thanksgiving 2001...just as the walls started to crumble:
"F*ck you, you piece of sh*t. I can't wait to see you go down with the ship like all the other vermin. Smug, paranoid, unhappy mother f*cker. Eat sh*t."
What have I learned from this (what I thought was an) innocent Google search? Never put in your corporate email something you wouldn't later mind being in the public domain, literally for the entire world to see, spelling mistakes, warts and all. And 2, never, ever trust the CEO with the toothy grin who promises the world. He very well may be stealing your pension.
posted by Eleanor @ 8:15 pm
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